Your apps are already living on borrowed time
Carl Pei doesn’t wear the superhero cape of Sam Altman, yet the Nothing CEO just stamped an expiration date on every colorful square that currently litters your home screen. Speaking on YouTube last week, Pei forecast that AI agents—not chatbots, but autonomous digital concierges—will erase standalone apps before the decade is out. No more hopscotching from Booking to Ryanair to TripAdvisor; one persistent agent will handle flights, hotels, restaurants, even rebooking when a storm hits. The phone’s job flips: instead of launching icons, the OS will broker spoken wishes to back-end services, learning tastes so well that screens themselves may fade into optional extras.
The disappearing app store moment
Pei’s logic is brutal. Smartphones exist to mediate demand and supply; AI collapses that gap. Today you need a different UI for each intent—messaging, payments, navigation—because developers packaged them in discrete bundles. An agent with permanent access to your calendar, budget and biometrics can transact directly through APIs, no tap required. Nothing, fittingly, is already experimenting with an “ambient OS” layer that prioritizes voice and lock-screen cards over app grids. Pei’s timeline: beta glimpses within two years, wholesale replacement before 2030.
Investors smell blood. Since the video went live, shares in Airbnb, Expedia and Uber slipped between 3-6%, a knee-jerk bet that gatekeeper margins evaporate once software agents choose providers. Meanwhile startups like Rabbit and Humane have raised hundreds of millions on the same thesis, shipping pocket devices that contain no app store at all.
Incumbent defenses and human inertia
Big Tech won’t surrender ad inventory without a brawl. Apple’s App Store nets an estimated $24 billion in annual commissions; Google’s Play is close. Both firms are racing to embed their own agents—Siri and Bard respectively—inside the operating system precisely to keep control of user data while third-party apps fade. Regulatory pressure adds another headwind: the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces gatekeepers to allow rival assistant layers, a clause that could slow consolidation.
And then there’s us. Humans like swiping. Pei admits the dopamine loop of browsing sneakers or juggling budget flights scratches an itch deeper than efficiency. Surveys by Deloitte show 62% of travelers enjoy planning more than the trip itself. Handing the process to an unseen bot could feel like outsourcing vacation foreplay.
Still, the math is remorseless. The average U.S. user downloads zero new apps per month, yet screen time keeps rising—proof we’re trapped in legacy grids. Once an agent books, pays and troubleshoots faster than you can type a password, nostalgia for icons will sound like longing for the floppy disk. Pei’s prophecy is less a question of if than of who cashes out first—and whether we’ll even notice the moment the last folder empties itself.